The trend of employee monitoring seems to be catching on as employers are turning to spying software like Mobistealth to see how their employees are spending their time at work. Previously, the employers just wanted to ensure that their employees spend their hours working, but now they are taking it a step further, rendering privacy utterly useless. In many organizations where employers have installed spy apps on employees’ computers, they are not only keeping an eye on what their employees are up to, but are also getting their hands on their personal information, committing a blatant invasion of privacy.

Monitoring and Spying

What employers fail to realize is that there’s a huge difference between monitoring and spying. Monitoring is when you are just keeping an eye on employees’ work with the intention of discouraging them from wasting their time on distractions or doing something illegal. However, as soon as you invade personal space of an employee, it becomes spying. Even if the person you’re spying on is aware of it, it still doesn’t justify your actions as employers have no right to delve into any of their employees’ lives just because they are paying the latter. The employers should just be concerned about the work that they need completed and leave the rest to their employees.

Activities that Employers Monitor

The advent of monitoring software has made it extremely easy for employers to just sit back in their seats and watch what their employees are doing. Multiple monitoring software provide different features that allow employers to keep an eye on employees’ locations, e-mails, social networking sites, messages, calls, and their internet activities. These are the options that are available to an employer and it is up to them to use it responsibly enough so that the employees don’t feel that their privacy is being invaded.

Employers must go Easy

With great power comes great responsibility and that is what employers need to understand. Just because they are empowered by state-of-the-art spying technology to keep an eagle eye on their employees doesn’t give them the right to snoop on the latter’s private emails, social networking activities, text messages, etc. Yes, they are very much within their right to monitor their employees, but only if they are doing it with the intended motivation of protecting their reasonable business concerns.

Employees should be Careful too

Employees may not be very fond of getting monitored, but they need to understand that they have no one but themselves to blame for this trend. If they realize the fact that they made an agreement with their employer to devote their time to work during office hours at the time of hiring, and then stick to this commitment later, the employers would have no reason to use spy apps. The need for such a measure only arises when employees are found to be spending a considerable amount of their time on distractions instead of focusing on the official tasks on hand. Furthermore, incidents of data leakage and other activities also compel employers to precautionary measures. Employees need to refrain from anything and everything that hurts the reasonable concerns of employers in any way. By doing that, they would render the need for use of spy apps in workplace pointless.